Starbucks vs The Wobblies
Somehow an article about the IWW and Starbucks slipped through our comprehensive web of Google alerts yesterday and we didn't find it until today when Starbucks Gossip linked to it. Sorry about that. Baristas at a few New York Starbucks and one in Chicago affiliate themselves with the IWW. It's a story we've heard over and over for the past three and half years now and it's not going away any time soon, despite the union's failure to get much traction among the baristarati, a crowd that is generally perceived as more than a little leftist. Apparently there is some difference between an indie cafe barista and a Starbucks barista.
The story will never die because Starbucks and the IWW are two culturally loaded icons that are just too damn intriguing when mixed into the same pot. Unfortunately, most of the articles that mention the two together are either short newsy reports from daily papers or propaganda from organized labor publications. The piece in the Seattle Times yesterday is by far the best accounting we've come across to date, though. With any luck someone's working on something that digs a little deeper at Harpers or the like right now. Please, media world, don't make us read about this in Mother Jones.
The movement will never succeed because 1) the IWW is more of a political figurehead than a uniting force these days and 2) by most accounts Starbucks baristas just don't have it that bad and 3) organized labor is dead and 4) even if it weren't the high-turnover rates of service industry jobs like those at Starbucks make cafes an unlikely beachhead.
